Heritage et AL

Celebrating African stories in Tāmaki Makaurau This month we celebrate the rich heritage and influence the African Diaspora has had, and continues to have, in Tāmaki Makaurau. You can learn about it and discover amazing stories with African Voices: The Stories of the Lands , our new oral history collection funded by the Creative Content initiative. Image from left to right: Mahad Yusuf, Tina Bonsu Maro, Boubacar Coulibaly, Dr Love Chile, Lema Shamamba. A community-led oral history project This project had a ground-up and holistic collaboration, genuine commitment and regional relationships. With the assistance of a Cultural Advisor, we discussed the idea and if the project would be beneficial for the community.  After aligning expectations and the project goal it was decided that only people born in Africa would be interviewed for this project. We chose people from different ethnicities and age groups. Trying to reflect the impacts they had in different areas. Stories from the...

Written by Sue Bradford - John Stacpoole Scholar 2025 In February 1983 I was one of the organisers of a public meeting of over a hundred people at the Pitt St Methodist Church Hall in Auckland.  Called in the face of high and rising unemployment and the punitive treatment of beneficiaries, those present agreed to set up a new organisation, the Auckland Unemployed Workers Rights Centre (AUWRC).   Little did I know that I would spend much of the next 16 years of my life working with AUWRC, right up until the group’s decision to dissolve itself in July 1999.   Last year I was grateful to receive the Auckland Library Heritage Trust’s John Stacpoole scholarship.  This gave me the opportunity to sort and inventory a selection of AUWRC materials which I had managed to retrieve and store over the decades since our closure.  The completed archive will be accessioned by the Libraries’ Heritage Collections shortly.   The new archive presents a somewhat ...